Comment 100 for bug 197762

> I confirm this on amd64 machine with ubuntu 8.10 with latest updates installed.
> It is really disappointing to see a bug this critical has not been fixed for this long
> a time. My disappointment apart, if somebody an find a work around for this, it
> will be greatly useful.

Mounting drives manually fixes this problem for me, it's tedious I know but fixes the problem.

To mount a drive manually, identify its name by executing
sudo sfdisk -ls -uM
which lists all drives connected, their sizes and types, the execute a command similar to the following
sudo mount <device_name> <empty_folder>
where <device_name> is the device name you identified using the previous command and <empty_folder> is the path of an empty folder where the drive will be mounted, if it's NTFS, I think you'll need to use 'mount.ntfs-3g' instead of 'mount'

Example:
$ sudo sfdisk -ls -uM
/dev/sda: 244198584

Disk /dev/sda: 30401 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = mebibytes of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start End MiB #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 0+ 12291- 12292- 12586896 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 17602+ 120001- 102399- 104856255 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 120001+ 238472- 118472- 121314847+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda5 120001+ 140482- 20482- 20972826 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 140482+ 191681- 51200- 52428096 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 237445+ 238472- 1028- 1052226 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 191972+ 227812- 35841- 36700461 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb: 625131864

so I pick /dev/sda6 and create a folder /mnt/tmp then execute
sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/tmp

note: Before removing the device you need to execute
sudo umount <device_name>
or
sudo umount <folder_name>

You can find the official longer guide at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB